<p>Well I got the idea of your post; it was quite clear.
I just don’t see why people argue something that’s logical. There is a correlation, there is no arguing that. Does the correlation always hold true? No. Does it need to? No.</p>
<p>Of course they will not correlate perfectly. We don’t live in a perfect world where some of the brightest students drop out of school to help support their family.</p>
<p>Agreed. I just didn’t expect someone to insist that a mid GPA/high intelligence student somehow says something about high GPA students. I wanted to see if there was more behind it.</p>
<p>If I annoyed you in the process, I apologize =). It wasn’t intentional.</p>
<p>You are all arguing over something that’s mostly ignored after your first job. Once you get into the working world, GPA doesn’t matter. What matters is what you can do. This is like arguing over who has the biggest baseball card collection.</p>
<p>What I don’t get, is what seemingly gives some people the idea that they are innately qualified to assess other people’s intelligence.</p>
<p>Maybe the guy who got that ridiculously high score while everyone failed was the “high IQ/high GPA type”. </p>
<p>Most professors curves according to what he thinks is appropriate regardless of the outliers. That one kid with the 100 when class average is a 43 didn’t ruin the curve for everyone. That isn’t how it work. If there is a grading curve, then it typically goes by percentages and brackets. For example, everyone gets a A,B,C if they lie in this bracket (90-100=A, 80-90=B, 70-80=C) or are in this percentage (top 20%=A, top 50%=B, top 70%=C). If you are top 70% but have a 90+, then you will get an A for the class.</p>
<p>He might not curve that particular exam but your finals grades are based on the above idea. Besides, if you feel like you got a C because of that one kid, well, your grade was probably below class average</p>
<p>My son went though this in several of his classes where his course average was well over 100. In those courses, he could have skipped the final and still received an A (pointswise).</p>
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<p>All of my classes have been this way, too. If there is a curve, then a certain percentage of students get an A, etc., It might depend on where there are significant gaps in raw grades, but outliers don’t affect these types of curves.</p>
<p>Kudos for pointing this out. We were talking about “curve setters” earlier and that’s misleading.</p>
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<p>Err. This sentence conflicts with your point above. In order for your grade to have any relation to an average, the curve would NOT be a percentile-based curve. Instead, the curve would have to center on the average–which means that outliers DO affect the distribution of grades. Personally, I’ve never had such a curve and I don’t think they’re common. </p>
<p>In a percentile-based curve, the C student could be well above average average. I think you would usually see this in a class where there is sharp grade inflation but still quite a few people don’t bother to show/don’t take tests, etc., (causing a negative skew). But correct me if I’m wrong there.</p>
<p>^ If you are below class average, and class average is below grade average, it is not unexpected to have a C</p>
<p>Honestly, who gets Cs anymore? It’s 2010.</p>
<p>^ Anything below a B for your major is failing in decent schools</p>
<p>How decent is decent? At justtotalk’s school, the average GPAs are ridiculously high for everything in spite of the student body not being overly high-IQ.</p>
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<p>Sure, it’s not unexpected, but the average grade isn’t related to the curve. </p>
<p>Suppose there’s 50 students and the curve is set so that the 50% percentile gets a BC. 49% get a 90%, and 49% get a 30%. If you get an 89% you get a BC. If you get a 31% you get a BC. In either case, the average was around 60%.</p>
<p>Extreme case, but a subtler difference is valid for more common grade distributions within a course.</p>
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<p>This is true. I think the average across all majors is like 3.2 (engineering ~3.0, business ~3.1, many liberal arts are unusually high). But this grade inflation is a problem everywhere.</p>
<p>I can’t believe business would only be .1 higher than engineering. That’s whack. Your school is whack.</p>
<p>Anyone have an answer on this “under 3.0 is failing in your major” nonsense? Where is this a rule?</p>
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<p>what are you, a child? come on, this isn’t an ‘alternate story’. it’s mostly the same story you told, but put into context instead of being fodder for an agenda.</p>
<p>was he really the only post-doctorate to not immediately get a teaching job, or is this something you are assuming?</p>
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<p>I quoted an article, I didn’t “tell a story”. If you’re going to attack me attack me, if you’re going to attack an article posted by someone else on the internet attack them.</p>
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<p>It’s not a fallacy, you’re too thickheaded to understand it. Sorry to be so blunt but it’s been discussed for two pages.</p>
<p>Einstein is the perfect example that almost utterly proves grades are not caused by intelligence.</p>
<p>What makes you think that you’re not being too thick headed to see the truth of the situation? Because from my eyes you clearly don’t understand. I’m sorry to be blunt, but I feel that your logical capacitance is either not high enough to quickly understand this, or being suppressed by your emotional bias. </p>
<p>Let me ask you a question. Do you think there is a correlation with responsibility and getting good grades? To be clear. Say there are two people, and the only difference between those two people is how responsible they are. Person A is very responsible and person B is not very responsible. Now, to ignore the person specific effects of one individual, apply this to a whole student body. In the student body there are people of two types. Type A and type B. Do you think the students of type A or type B would perform better?</p>
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<p>I probably am. </p>
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<p>I know. I wish you would lead me step by step through your thinking process so I could quickly concede and we’d be done with it =). Please do so if you have the time.</p>
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<p>Yes, I agree–sort of. If Einstein was an average student, then not all intelligent people can be high GPA students. Thus, intelligence alone can not guarantee high grades.</p>
<p>However, I think the argument presented earlier was such: extremely strong students (“curve setters”) are typically intelligent. For simplicity, we categorized curve setters as simply high GPA students.</p>
<p>You said that Albert Einstein was a counter example to this statement. There is actually strong evidence that Albert Einstein was a strong student (I showed you the ABC news article), but we ignored this. </p>
<p>Instead, we supposed Einstein actually was an average student. In this context, Einstein is an example of an average student with high intelligence. Does this say anything about the intelligence of high GPA students? No. Does this say anything about the correlation between intelligence and GPA? No (except that it’s not perfectly +1 across the entire human population). </p>
<p>The only thing this says is that intelligence can not exclusively guarantee high GPA. It can not be the sole factor. </p>
<p>Intelligence does not need to cause high GPA in order for high GPA students to be intelligent. Thus, curve setters could typically be highly intelligent even though intelligence is not the cause of their high GPA. The Einstein example does not counter this; it doesn’t even counter that ALL curve setters are intelligent. </p>
<p>And then the question became: are there any conditions where Albert Einstein would be a counter example showing that not all high GPA students could be intelligent. Yes, if and only if there is a perfect +1 correlation between intelligence and GPA. In this case, an intelligent person like Einstein would have to achieve a high GPA or else he is a counter example to the expected correlation. </p>
<p>Of course, the problem is that we assume Einstein is intelligent and we assume he got average grades. Thus he is an example proving that the correlation between GPA and intelligence is NOT +1. </p>
<p>=> Under no circumstances that I can see, does Einstein provide an example proving that not ALL high GPA students are intelligent.</p>
<p>Does this mean I believe all high GPA students are intelligent? No, but that doesn’t make your point valid.</p>
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<p>Lonesin, I stopped reading your posts after this one. Not only is it hard to follow, it is like you started typing, forgot what you were going to say, and then started on a new thought, and repeated it about 4 or 5 times.</p>
<p>Have you ever heard of psychological projection? Look it up here: [Psychological</a> projection - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection]Psychological”>Psychological projection - Wikipedia)</p>
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<p>[Ad</a> hominem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem]Ad”>Ad hominem - Wikipedia)</p>
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<p>I don’t know why you refuse to read what Lonesin types, but this sums up what I think too.</p>
<p>It’s accurate and fairly concise.</p>